THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF M2M AND THE IOT I used the same headline in 2013, so where are we now, two years on, and where are we heading? It should be clear that we are entering a new era, one that will give us some amazing, innovative applications and services. Should, because media hype about B2C IoT is obscuring the importance of M2M and B2B IoT. The terms have become entangled. Therefore let’s start with a clear, unambiguous definition of the difference. Caption: The M2M scenario, shown on the left, employs a vertical silo architecture in which three household services are provided by three standalone solutions. This structure is intrinsically rigid. The IoT scenario, shown on the right, enables cross-silo aggregation. Therefore the same services are provided by a single solution. This structure is intrinsically flexible. Adding more services does not impact on the structure. Schematic courtesy Ken Figueredo
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he IoT should be seen as an evolutionary development, one that employs M2M communications technology. Although the IoT architecture is different, it is built on a common foundation. A key IoT requirement is the need to decouple data generation from data usage. In an M2M solution they are physically linked: they monitor one issue, a physical parameter or the movement of a machine part, and transfer the data into a single application. This model cannot deliver the IoT vision. So what is that vision? It’s vast. Example: Consider the installation of a people-counting sensor on a train; the operating company uses the data to monitor passenger patterns. At a later date the maintenance organisation adds an application that employs the same data in order to move to a usage based scheduling system. This is followed by the catering 8 Industry Europe
company that delivers products to the train, by the stations to warn of approaching passenger loads and then by city or town authorities establishing transport strategies. It started out as a single, simple app, counting passengers, but ends up as a mix of applications that includes those of third parties: that would not be possible in a solution based on the M2M model. The IoT model is based on an open, flexible architecture that allows multiple device types, monitoring a variety of assets, to interact with each other as well as a diverse range of applications and stakeholders. These are mandatory parameters.
A services centric economy IoT advances the many benefits provided by M2M, but leverages its intrinsic functionality by adopting the decoupled ICT architec-
ture that has been in place for decades in enterprise environments and which is also employed in social networks. Twitter is a service. Hash tags define topics and users don’t need to know anything about device addresses or the communications architecture. They simply register their interest in receiving messages when hash tag matches their criteria. Data on new topics can be added at any time, new hash tags are generated, but the underlying architecture doesn’t change. We take the functionality of this service for granted and that’s the way it should be, and will be, in the upcoming service-centric IoT era. The use of a topic-based IoT architecture would allow new data flows (topics) to be added at any time. Applications would register an interest in a topic that contains
